[gentoo-user] Re: PDF: convert to grayscale

[nunojsilva@ist.utl.pt (Nuno J. Silva)]

Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org> writes:

> Grant Edwards writes:
>
>> On 2011-02-08, Nuno J. Silva <nunojsilva@ist.utl.pt> wrote:
>> > Does anyone know a tool (other than ghostscript) that is able to
>> > convert a PDF (or postscript) to grayscale?
>> > 
>> > Ghostscript does this, but is unable to convert gradients and fills
>> > (they're replaced by bitmaps) which results in a too big file unless I
>> > drastically reduce quality.
>> 
>> I don't understand what you're asking for.  What sort of output format
>> do you want (raster, vector, ???)?
>
> I think he wants the same PDF as the original file. Only in grayscale.

Yeah, that's it. I ended up hacking the PDF to convert all RGB to
grayscale, but even if the result was the original without colors (what
I wanted), converting it to ghostscript made some text unreadable (white
on white), so it was clearly not a good idea to trust it to look the
same everywhere.

I gave up and used the color version.

> This is one method to do this, but it needs Acrobat 8 Professional:
> http://blog.gilbertconsulting.com/2007/05/convert-color-pdf-to-grayscale.html

Thanks for the link. Although I don't have Acrobat, if I ever happen to
get access to it I'll probably check that feature :-)

-- 
Nuno J. Silva
gopher://sdf-eu.org/1/users/njsg